Sony drops price of PS Vita to $199

Sony used their Gamescom press conference today to drop the price of their Wi-Fi PlayStation Vita to $199 in the U.S. and €199 in Europe.

The price drop is significant as the current prices are $249/€249. Additionally, the company says there will be "significant reductions in the price of PS Vita memory cards" in the near future.

Gamers (and industry watchers) have been begging for Sony to drop the price, especially as the system has struggled to meet even lowered expectations for sales. Last year, the company said it was still "too early" for a price cut.

Sony reduced the price of the console in Japan by at least 20 percent in February.

Exactly! It was the expensive proprietary memory cards that killed the entire system. Had Sony made it take just regular Micro SDHC these things would fly off the shelves.

They thought it was the Micro SDHC's that helped the hackers and homebrewers open up the last PSP to custom firmware. So they made their own proprietary memory cards....but then got greedy and way overpriced them. Because of that people refused to buy them and since there is no demand for games publishers abandoned the system. No good games have come out in forever on the Vita and it's Sony's greed that killed it. I THINK they learned their lessons from the huge bomb the Vita was and are not playing around with the PS4. Seems they are doing everything right.

Sadly in all reality the PSVita is an amazing and really cool piece of gaming hardware. The specs and what it could do should easily make it the number 3 console in sales behind PS3 and Xbox. With tons of games. It SHOULD be a success. And still could be if sony just did one revision to it before or almost right after PS4 launch and changed the memory slot to hold and read both their proprietary memory cards and/or Micro SDHC. If they do this....by this time next year sales will double.

Actually, they are playing around with the PS4...they issued a ton of official rumors to see how pissed off people would get, then denied the worst of them in a half-hearted way that implies that they will all come true after launch instead of at the same time as launch.

The Vita was hurt by Sony failing to test the water with anti-consumer crap, but really...how could they have launched with a SD card slot and then gone to proprietary later? As for just being consumer friendly...we are talking about Sony; this is a company that put malware on music CDs to screw up peoples PC's when they listened from the CD-Rom drive...claiming later that they did it to stop people from copying music CDs, while at the same time selling blank disks, cd copying software, and even standalone disk-to-disk copier devices. The PS4 is the sequel to the PS3...a console that was hacked because they removed Linux...which they claim they did to prevent it from being hacked, but conveniently once Linux was gone as an alternative, they started to break features such as YouTube...seemingly just to piss people off.

If the price of the Vita dropped to $30 I'd probably buy one just to remove the display and use it for something else...but that's the only appeal this thing has to me.